Pinterest entities
This document defines Pinterest entities and discusses how they work together.
Pinner and Business accounts
All users will have one of the following types of accounts. The type of actions you can perform will be impacted by the type of account the authenticated user has.
Pinner account
A personal user account aka "Pinner account" allows the user to:
- Create and delete Pins
- Create boards and board sections
- Save Pins to boards or board sections
Business account
Business accounts are a free Pinterest account type with extra features on top of a user account. A user can either convert their Pinner account to a Business account or create a new Business account.
Business accounts allow users to:
- Run ads
- Access ads analytics
- Assign roles and permissions to people (e.g. employees) to have shared access to the business account
Pins and ads
Content on Pinterest is in the form of Pins.
Pins which have not been promoted are referred to as organic Pins. All ads are created by promoting an existing organic Pin.
It is important to note that there are different formats available for organic Pins vs ads. Formats which are only supported as ads follow the same creation flow through the API but will not get distributed in its organic form.
Organic Pins support two formats: image and video. For a full breakdown of supported ad formats, review our Ad formats guide here.
Other details to understand about ads:
- An advertiser will own an ad account
- Ad accounts can create campaigns
- Campaigns include ad groups
- Ad groups contain ads
- No two ads in the same ad group can be derived from the same organic Pin
Boards
Boards are where Pins are saved. Most boards will contain a collection of Pins which are organized by a common theme. For example if a Pinner is saving Pins of food recipes, they may save those Pins to a board titled 'Recipes to try'. Additionally, boards can contain sections which allow Pinners to further organize their curated content.
The API supports the creation of boards, board sections, and saving Pins to boards. Saving a Pin to a board is essentially organizing the Pin onto the chosen board.
Other details to understand about boards:
- Each board may include one or more sections
- Each board or board section may include one or more Pins
- Each Pin has a unique Pin id and can only be associated with one board or board section
Catalogs
Businesses can use the API to manage catalog feeds which can then show up as product Pins on Pinterest. Uploading a catalog feed is required if a merchant wants to create Shopping ads.
Once an advertiser has uploaded their catalog feed, they can create product groups to organize the items in their feed. To create ads from these items, the advertiser will then need to promote those product groups.
Other details to understand about Catalogs:
- Each catalog may include one or more product groups
- Promoting a product group creates Shopping ads
- Product groups are similar to ad groups but are specific to catalog items
Entity hierarchy
Below is another diagram to help illustrate how our entities exist with each other.
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